Thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom. They came looking to the organizers of this year’s “Not a Commemoration, a Continuation” march to help transform a public demonstration into a robust legislative agenda that can aggressively counter the recent assaults on American democracy.
That certainly was the thinking three years ago, when more than 100,000 marchers traveled to the nation’s capital at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to publicly protest the brutal killing of George Floyd and to call for sweeping police reforms.
Dr. Jamal Watson
And while Congress has yet to pass the Justice in Policing Act—which would establish a national standard for policing—the Commitment March of 2020 organized by Reverend Al Sharpton, established key priorities that resulted in major legislative victories throughout the country, including the banning of chokeholds and no-knock warrants in some states, and the mandatory use of body cameras in others. And lest we forget, on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death last May, President Biden—with George Floyd’s daughter Gianna, and Sharpton standing behind him in the East Room of The White House—signed a historic executive order to improve accountability in policing. The executive order requires federal law enforcement agencies to review and revise policies on use of force and create a database to help track officer misconduct.
These criminal justice reforms should not be considered small feats, but monumental achievements in the ongoing struggle to marry protest with policy. It’s not a new strategy for sure, but one that the 68-year-old Sharpton has aptly borrowed from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders who successfully employed this tactic throughout the 1960s.
It took nearly two years after King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Acts Act into law. That groundbreaking piece of legislation was directly tied to the 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery that civil rights leaders staged in response to the horrific events that occurred in 1965, most notably the brutal death of a 26-year-old Black Alabama man name Jimmie Lee Jackson; the murder of a white Unitarian minister from Massachusetts named James Reeb, and the bloodied beating of John Lewis, Hosea Williams and others on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
With the 2024 presidential election on the horizon, Sharpton knows—perhaps better than anyone else—the importance of formulating a public policy agenda that can aggressively chip away at the roadblocks that have been erected to dismantle affirmative action, abortion rights, the banning of books and attempts by governors to do away with the teaching of Black history.
